There are poems that ask to be understood, and then there are poems that ask to be believed. Dorothy Chan’s “I Am Working Through My Sexual Trauma” belongs to the latter. This is not a poem interested in neat arcs or redemptive shortcuts. It does not offer the reader the comfort of distance. Instead, it insists on proximity—on sitting inside the body as it remembers, recoils, negotiates, survives. Chan writes from the place where language lags behind sensation, where the mind understands long before the body consents, where power masquerades as tenderness and desire is tangled with inheritance, race, and the violent myths we are taught to call romance.
What makes this poem devastating—and necessary—is its refusal of the “perfect victim” narrative. Chan dismantles that lie line by line. She shows us how harm hides in banter, in praise, in food, in the performance of care. How coercion dresses itself up as patience. How Asian femme bodies are flattened into pornographic shorthand, consumed and erased at the same time. The poem moves through therapy rooms, hotel rooms, childhood memories, and pop-cultural fantasies not to confuse us, but to tell the truth about how trauma actually lives: fragmented, circular, lodged in the smallest details—sauces, mirrors, math problems, fireworks that never quite land where they should.
This is a poem about reclaiming power without pretending that reclamation is clean. It is about naming what happened after years of being told it was nothing—or worse, that it was owed. Chan’s work reminds us that survival is not silence, and clarity does not require forgiveness. These lines do not ask for sympathy; they demand recognition. They offer a fierce, lucid witness to what it means to choose yourself again and again, even when the body has learned fear before language. To read this poem is to be changed by its honesty—and to understand that healing, like poetry, is not about resolution, but about telling the truth until it can finally breathe.
Dorothy Chan (she/they) is the author of five poetry collections, including Return of the Chinese Femme (Deep Vellum, 2024), a 2025 finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Bisexual Poetry; BABE (Diode Editions, 2021), a 2022 finalist for the Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize from the New England Poetry Club; Revenge of the Asian Woman (Diode Editions, 2019), a finalist for the 2023 Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize and the 2020 Lambda Literary Award in Bisexual Poetry; Attack of the Fifty-Foot Centerfold (Spork Press, 2018); and the chapbook, Chinatown Sonnets (New Delta Review, 2017), selected by Douglas Kearney for the 6th Annual New Delta Review Chapbook Contest. They are a two-time Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from The Poetry Foundation and a 2019 recipient for the Philip Freund Prize in Creative Writing from Cornell University. Chan is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and Founder of Honey Literary Inc., a 501(c)(3) BIPOC literary arts organization. They were a 2022 recipient of the University of Wisconsin System’s Dr. P.B. Poorman Award for Outstanding Achievement on Behalf of LGBTQ+ People. Chan’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Best American Poetry 2025, The American Poetry Review, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Poetry Society of America, Literary Hub, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. Visit their website at dorothypoetry.com.